The Villa Madama made a strong impression on Palladio, who drew a measured plan of what had been built. He also must have copied details, for Raphael’s rusticated basement windows reappeared in the basement of the Villa Pisani. In a more general way, the Villa Madama showed Palladio how a modern building could be based on the study and creative interpretation of ancient precedents. Raphael, whose client was one of the most powerful men in Rome, was inspired by the luxurious pleasure-villas of the late Roman Republic. These sprawling complexes survived in ruins such as those of Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli, or in ancient texts, notably Pliny the Younger’s detailed description of his seaside villa at Laurentum. Such pleasure-villas were characterized by a variety of partially enclosed outdoor spaces: atria, courtyards, porticoes, loggias, airy colonnades, sunny terraces, walled gardens with pools. The Villa Madama, even in its unfinished state, includes not only the semicircular forecourt but also garden walls and a garden terrace built above giant semicircular recesses that overlook a fishpond. These structures are not part of the house proper, but amplify its architectural impact, extending the villa into the landscape.
The idea of enlarging the architectural presence of a house by means of walls, garden structures, and outbuildings must have appealed to Palladio, who was familiar with Pliny’s writing. But the Roman imperial villas and the Villa Madama were much larger than anything Palladio was asked to build—Raphael’s circular courtyard alone could accommodate the entire Villa Pisani with room to spare. So Palladio turned to a passage of Vitruvius that described the typical Roman country house with “an atrium surrounded by a paved portico.” At the Villa Pisani, Palladio enlarged the atrium into a courtyard. His design for the porticoes was wonderfully simple: a continuous shed roof resting on a back wall and supported by columns. The structures were not completed until the 1560s, and it is unclear whether they followed the simple design that Palladio sketched in an early plan, the more elaborate design illustrated in Quattro libri, or some modified version. They were, in any case, impressive—Vasari singled them out as “most beautiful.”11
The porticoes enclosed a formal, ceremonial space. Despite Palladio’s claim that the courtyard was for “farm use,” it was hardly a barnyard with piles of manure, rooting pigs, and clucking chickens. A 1569 plan of the Pisani estate that hangs in the villa shows a second courtyard that is across the road from the villa and is obviously intended for agricultural use.12 The stables and storage rooms around the formal cortile were for the convenience of the immediate household. The surface of the cortile was probably gravel, and it would have resembled a piazza, while the porticoes provided a protected space around the edge, just like the arcades of many Vicentine towns. The introduction of such urban features into a country estate is another aspect of Palladio’s delicate balance of sophistication and rusticity, of bringing city people—and city life—into the country.
When Palladio designed features like the cortile, he did so entirely on paper; Renaissance architects sometimes built wooden models of their designs, but only for large buildings such as churches. Palladio was a particularly able draftsman—neat, skillful, precise.III Drawings were always made in ink since pencils were unknown, and graphite and graphite holders were not invented until 1565.13 Sometimes he started with a light underdrawing using a crayon or a piece of metallic lead. His chief drawing instruments were wooden rulers, set squares, metal dividers, and compasses. He sketched and drew with a quill pen, using purplish black iron gall ink made from oak apples; today, as the iron has oxidized, the ink has turned various shades of sepia and brown.14
There was no such thing as tracing paper. Palladio drew on heavy, hand-laid, watermarked paper that came in octavo sizes—about sixteen by twenty inches. Paper was not particularly rare or expensive, but he was frugal in its use and most of his drawings are small, no larger than a modern sheet of typing paper. The sheets tend to be crammed with drawings. He once covered a small sheet with no fewer than twenty plan variations for a palazzo.15 The freehand ink sketches are only postage stamp–size but include details such as staircases. In one variation the stair is oval; in another, circular; in the third, rectangular; and the sala changes from a square to a rectangle to a cross. Slightly larger-scale plans include scribbled dimensions and details such as fireplaces. Palladio often made such preliminary sketches on the backs of his old drawings; the palazzo plans are on the back of a sheet containing a façade and cross section of a Roman temple.
Four surviving drawings by Palladio of the Villa Pisani offer an extraordinary glimpse into his working method. He recorded his first idea on the back of a sheet containing a preliminary version of the Villa Valmarana.16 The lightly drawn, freehand Pisani sketch is a floor plan, and shows the thicknesses of the walls as well as the location of doors, windows, and fireplaces. There are four rooms on each side of a rectangular sala with apsidal ends; an X marks the cross-vaults of the ceiling. The most striking feature of the plan is a colonnaded semicircular loggia cut into the front of the house. Historians believe that this unusual device, called a hemicycle, was inspired by either the Villa Madama’s truncated circular courtyard or by Bramante’s Cortile del Belvedere, which Palladio had also seen in Rome. His version differs significantly from Raphael’s in its smaller size, its function (as the entrance to a house), and in being roofed.
PALLADIO’S FIRST SKETCH OF THE VILLA PISANI, 1541 (RIBA, XVII/2 verso)
Palladio’s sketch is striking for its symmetry—that is, one side of the plan is a mirror image of the other. “Rooms must be distributed at either side of the entrance and the hall,” he wrote, “and one must ensure that those on the right correspond and are equal to those on the left.”17 He went on to glibly explain that this was desirable for structural reasons, which is not actually true. In fact, like all Renaissance architects, Palladio favored symmetry for aesthetic reasons (and not only in plans, façades were symmetrical, too). “Look at Nature’s own works,” Alberti had pointed out, “if someone had one huge foot, or one hand vast and the other tiny, he would look deformed.”18 Palladio also often made analogies between buildings and the human body, once pointing out that “just as our blessed God has arranged our own members so that the most beautiful are in positions most exposed to view and the more unpleasant are hidden, we too when building should place the most important and prestigious parts in full view and the less beautiful in locations concealed as far from our eyes as possible.”19 Thus, in the Pisani plan, the “less beautiful” stairs are hidden in a leftover space behind the hemicycle.
PALLADIO’S DRAFTED PLAN, 1541 (RIBA, XVII/18 verso)
Palladio obviously made this hurriedly scrawled sketch for his own use, but the next surviving plan was probably intended for his client, since it is carefully drafted.20 Drafted drawings required two steps. A contemporary of Palladio described the process: “For the fair copy of buildings we draw the line with an ivory nib, and then with a pen.”21 The ivory or ebony nib was used to score invisible guidelines into the paper. There are signs that Palladio frequently modified these ghostly preliminary drawings before the final inking. The ink lines were drawn using a ruler; decorative elements on façades such as wreaths, statues, or rustication were drawn freehand. Palladio often applied a diluted ink wash to accentuate the thickness of the walls in plans, to pick out loggias and windows in elevations, or to add shadows. The results are drawings of great clarity—and striking severity. Rooms are rarely labeled and furniture is never shown, though key room dimensions are included; there are never titles and rarely notes; there are no decorative borders. Occasionally, Palladio added a scale bar.IV These do not appear to be construction drawings in the modern sense. They may have been shown to the foreman to establish the main dimensions of the foundations, but it is likely that illiterate artisans depended on verbal instructions and sketchy overall directions. In any case, such drawings were too precious—and fragile—to leave on the building site.
The design of the Villa Pisani was considerably simplified in the
drafted plan. Palladio changed the apsidal ends of the sala to small niches and reduced the number of rooms from eight to six. At the same time, he added a square vaulted space, a sort of large vestibule, between the loggia and the sala. The sequence of small, medium, and large rooms, each with a different proportion (a small rectangle, a square, a large rectangle), was an exact copy of the arrangement in Trissino’s villa at Cricoli.
The third surviving plan, likewise drafted in ink, is drawn at a smaller scale and includes not only the house but the entire cortile, with columned porticoes on two sides and a wall across the end.22 Palladio drew the river with fanciful curlicues (and redundantly labeled it fiume). The house plan is further refined. In the previous versions, the rooms on each side of the sala are simply placed one behind the other; now the largest rooms are ingeniously turned ninety degrees so that their long side faces the courtyard. Presumably at Pisani’s request, the public rooms have been drastically simplified: the sala has lost its apses, and the square vaulted vestibule has been entirely eliminated. On the other hand, the hemicycle is now more elaborate, with a semicircle of columns defining the Bramantesque stair.
PALLADIO’S SITE PLAN, 1541 (RIBA, XVI/7)
PALLADIO’S FOURTH PLAN WITH A FRONT VIEW, 1542 (RIBA, XVII/17)
Palladio is not finished yet. Pisani must have demanded larger rooms, judging from the fourth surviving plan.23 Palladio adds complicated corner niches in the smallest rooms, making them hexagonal in plan. In the process of modifying the room sizes, he reconfigures the layout of the sala, making it T-shaped with a cross-vault in the center. He must believe the planning process is at an end, for now—and only now—he turns his attention to the exterior of the house. This sheet combines the floor plan with a drawing of the entrance façade—façade above, plan below. Two castello towers frame the hemicycle, which is overlooked by a large thermal window that brings light into the sala.
This drawing corresponds exactly to what was built in all respects but one: Palladio took out the hemicycle and replaced it with a rectangular, three-arch loggia. We do not know exactly when this change occurred. Since no drawing of the plan with the redesigned loggia has come to light, some historians conjecture that the change was made after construction had begun (the area beneath the loggia and the hall has no basement, so it is impossible to verify if the foundations were altered).24 The shape of the roof on this side of the house is complicated, as if it were the result of a last-minute alteration. What prompted such a drastic revision? It has been suggested that the late change was demanded by the client, and may even have been made without Palladio’s authorization.25 But why would Vettor Pisani, who had approved the hemicycle in several preliminary versions, suddenly change his mind? Surely not to save money, for he was fabulously wealthy, and the final loggia with its complicated apsidal ends and real stone facing—not a plaster facsimile—was hardly inexpensive. In any case, it is unlikely that the young nobleman second-guessed his architect on aesthetic matters.
It is not unusual for a novice designer to fall in love with an idea, only to suddenly discover—often late in the day—that he has made a mistake. Palladio’s design process for the Villa Pisani, as shown by the four surviving drawings, was one of both progressive refinement and trial and error. He may have come to the conclusion that while Raphael’s hemicycle looked impressive in a palatial structure overlooking the Tiber, it was ill-suited to a relatively small country house on the tiny Guà. I think he was right. His fussy little hemicycle, with its niches and columns, risked not only looking pretentious but also detracting from the sala, which had become the focus of his design. The hemicycle had to go. (And it never returned; while Palladio sometimes incorporated a hemicycle as a garden feature, he never again used it in a villa.)
THE FINAL PLAN AND COURTYARD FAÇADE FROM QUATTRO LIBRI
Palladio replaced the hemicycle with a more conventional rectangular loggia, but couldn’t resist adding apsidal ends recycled from his first sketch-plan. Since the shallow loggia required less depth than the hemicycle, he enlarged the sala, adding a short arm and turning the T-shaped room into a cruciform. On the exterior, he returned to a theme that he had begun to explore in two earlier villas. The Villa Valmarana, which still stands, is a solid little building covered by a simple gable roof. Palladio transformed the gable into a schematic pediment—the shallow triangular gable of an ancient temple—by outlining the eave with a molding that became a short, interrupted entablature cornice, similar to one he had seen in Rome on an ancient temple.26 (Or at least that was the way he drew the façade—the builders of the villa left out the cornice, just as they did not follow his complicated design for the window surrounds.) In the Villa Gazoto the pediment motif is more pronounced. The façade, modeled on a palazzo by Bramante, is divided into seven bays separated by flattened columns, or pilasters. The three central bays have arches opening into a loggia, above which is a large triangular dormer. It is perched rather tenuously on top of the simplified frieze that extends the full length of the house, but it is unmistakably a pediment.
Palladio designed the pilasters of the Villa Gazoto according to the rules laid down by Vitruvius. The so-called architectural orders, whose origin is Greek, are the foundation of classical architecture. The main elements of an order are the entablature, or beam, and the supporting columns. The entablature has three parts: the architrave, or lowest section; the frieze in the middle; and the cornice immediately under the eaves. The column consists of a base (often defined by moldings), a shaft (which can be plain or fluted), and a capital, or headpiece. Vitruvius described three orders—Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian—whose chief distinguishing feature was their capital: Doric capitals had simple moldings; Ionic capitals had volutes, or spirals, like the horns of a mountain ram; Corinthian capitals incorporated stylized acanthus leaves. Alberti identified an additional ancient Roman order that came to be known as Composite since it combined Ionic volutes and Corinthian leaves, while Serlio added the Tuscan order (a sort of simplified Doric), which Vitruvius had mentioned but did not describe. The five orders were often given human attributes: Doric was considered manly, Ionic womanly, and Corinthian maidenly. The undecorated Tuscan order was often used for utilitarian buildings, elegant Ionic in houses, rich Corinthian in ceremonial buildings, and Composite when an extra degree of luxury was called for. Palladio favored Ionic in the porticoes of his villas and rarely used Composite columns, but that is what he gave Gazoto, who had become wealthy speculating in salt in Treviso and probably wanted a showy house.
Palladio believed that in using a temple pediment on a house, he was following a Roman custom. “The ancients also employed [pediments] in their buildings, as one can see from the remains of temples and other public buildings,” he wrote, “it is very likely that they took this invention and its forms from private buildings, that is, from houses.”27 He was careful to write “likely,” since, in fact, there was no hard evidence for his supposition. Characteristically, he also saw practical advantages to pediments. “In all the buildings for farms and also for some of those in the city I have built a tympanum [the triangular panel inside the pediment] on the front façade where the principal doors are,” he explained, “because tympanums accentuate the entrance of the house and contribute greatly to the grandeur and magnificence of the building, thus making the front part more imposing than the others; furthermore, they are perfectly suited to the insignia or arms of the patrons, which are usually placed in the middle of façades.”28 Gazoto, being a commoner, had no armorial crest.
Palladio took the Villa Gazoto’s three-arch loggia and pediment as his model for the Villa Pisani, but instead of the Composite order, he used the plainer Doric, and added heavy rustication to the piers. He had already tried this motif, which he adapted from Sanmicheli’s Verona city gates, in the portal of the Palazzo Civena. He placed the Pisani coat of arms in the center of the tympanum. At first glance the loggia appears unexceptional; however, Palladio was not merely repeating an earlier solution. He
replaced the schematic frieze with a full Doric entablature, including an architrave, a frieze with triglyphs and metopes, and a cornice. The result is a complete representation of a Roman temple: columns, entablature, pediment. Or rather the ghostly shadow of a temple front, since the flattened pilasters and stylized capitals almost disappear into the heavy rustication. It is as if Palladio was not quite sure that he was doing the right thing. Yet this tentative design marks a historic moment, not only in his architectural development but in the history of Western architecture. It already holds the promise of numerous English country houses and Georgian plantation houses. All colonnaded entrance porticoes and pedimented house fronts share an architectural DNA that can be traced to the Villa Pisani.
The three villas—Valmarana, Gazoto, and Pisani—Palladio built after his heady Roman summer show a definite evolution, from interrupted pediment, to pediment, to full temple front. The next logical step would have been that most characteristic of Palladian features: the columned portico. However, architecture is not biology; ideas in design do not develop according to simple determinism. Palladio did explore the temple theme further—a few years after starting the Villa Pisani, he designed the Villa Thiene, a country house that incorporated a flattened temple front with giant pilasters rising the full height of the house. But in other villas he continued to use pediments without pilasters. A country house of this period that Palladio designed for Biagio Saraceno has a three-arch loggia as plain as the Villa Godi.
The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio Page 5